Highly Overrated But Still Good

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"Annika Bengtzon: Crime Reporter - Studio Sex" is the third movie based on Liza Marklund's novels, and the best so far. It still offers a very simple, even if more interesting than in previous efforts, mystery, but it excels in the atmosphere department, and the acting and direction are more sound and assured.The case is quite simple: the corpse of a woman is found in a park and Annika Bengtzon will try to find who killed her, getting entangled in politics, shady businesses and never backing down.The mystery per se is not much of a mystery. There is not much in character development, and the plot is your run-of-the-mill going from one place to another and then another and another... while Bengtzon talks with people trying to find more information about the killed woman and her lifestyle.But compared with the other movies, this has a better atmosphere and a good soundtrack, which helps in making the movie more interesting. Also the direction seems to have a clearer focus of where it is intending to go. And the actors seem more comfortable with their roles, starting with Malin Crépin, who seems more believable as Bengzton than in the other films. The character has some good moments, and Crépin holds her own in them.All in all, it is an interesting one hour and a half, not very deep but fun enough.

I find that the various adaptations of the Liza Marklund books, including this one, tend to be oversimplified to allow the film to be placed into a 90 minute time slot.The result is that the character development is weak, and the plot often simplified over what is depicted in the book.Of course, all film adaptations suffer from simplification for time reasons, but I find particularly with the Marklund books that this seriously detracts form the original work.For some reason, while Studio Sex is the first Bengtzon book chronologically (not in published order) by Marklund, it is not the first in the sequence of films, and thus we find Annika already married with two children (she was not in the book), and miss totally the development of her character before she was married and thus understand more clearly why she has some mental instability and is so driven by her career.

This Swedish crime drama doesn't have the intensity or bleakness of other Scandinavian hits like say, "The Killing" or even "Wallander", in fact think Swedish "Lou Grant" in the present day and you're close to the truth. This particular episode in fact took me all the way back to the 70's with the eponymous heroine reliving an old episode of "Police Woman" or "Charlie's Angels" by dressing up (or down) in a sort of wo-mankini to go after a sleazy young night-club owner who serially abuses his young female employees and goes too far with rape and murder on his mind. To be fair, I rather fancied that lead actress Malin Crepin looked distinctly uneasy in the part for this reason and confused me as to whether this was good or bad acting.The story aimed for a little "Borgen"-esque political intrigue going all the way up to the Prime Minister, reminding me too that the newspaper angle is better served in that particular programme, but this strand failed to really convince while the background details to Anna's life again failed to tell us much other than that she appears to be married to a Swedish version of Hugh Grant and is obsessive about her work. There's also the strong sense of cliché in the depiction of some of her work colleagues, notably the fire-breathing editor and calculating, pragmatic publisher.I personally think that these 90 minute long episodes could be quite easily cut to a more bite- sized 60 minutes but until they re-issue "Lou Grant" on DVD this is a palatable enough if hardly essential substitute.